How Music Can Make You Better by Indre Viskontas

Author:Indre Viskontas [Viskontas, Indre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2019-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

WHAT ABOUT THE MOZART EFFECT?

But can music make kids generally smarter? You might have heard that listening to Mozart is good for kids’ and even babies’ intelligence. Is that true?

The idea underlying the Mozart effect came from a study at the University of California, Irvine, published in 1993. While most current applications involve infants and toddlers, the study wasn’t conducted on children at all. Instead, university undergraduate students were asked to complete tests of cognitive abilities, like rotating shapes in their mind’s eye. Just before the tests, they did one of three things for ten minutes: sat in silence, listened to relaxation instructions, or listened to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major.

The students who listened to Mozart scored higher on tests of spatial cognition. But this enhancement lasted only a few minutes.

Then along came evidence of the Mozart effect in animals. In one study, rats were exposed to either Mozart’s piano sonata, minimalist music by Philip Glass, white noise, or silence in utero and then postpartum for about sixty days. After the intervention, the Mozart group completed a maze test significantly more quickly and with fewer errors than the other three groups. It seems that Mozart works for rats too!

But later, scientists found that pop songs worked just as well, in undergraduates anyway. Even reading a Stephen King story worked. So the effect wasn’t specific to Mozart—it was a general increase in arousal. Listening to music was more stimulating than sitting in silence or relaxing.

The rat finding is harder to interpret, as scientists don’t think rodents find Mozart’s music emotionally arousing. It might have to do with overlapping brain regions. Whether you’re a rat or a human, brain regions involved in spatial reasoning (such as navigating a maze) overlap with those activated by music with specific patterns (like Mozart’s). Maybe Mozartian music primes those regions in rats, so that when it’s time to solve a puzzle, they’re ready.

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